Christian Gerlach has asserted
that Hitler had decided on the physical
extermination of European Jewry on the 12th of December
1941, as a result of Germany's decision to declare war on
America following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour,
and because of Germany's military setbacks on the eastern
front.[1] His thesis is growing in popularity
amongst tenured historians.

Due to the fact that no Fuehrer Order exists to
corroborate Gerlach's thesis, the documentary evidence
for the extermination policy rests on two diary entries.
One is from the diary of Hans Frank, head of the
Generalgouvernement; the other is from the diary of Dr
Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda. The quote
from the Goebbels diary entry reads:

"In respect of the Jewish question, the
Fuehrer has decided," so says Goebbels, "to make a
clean sweep. The world war is here; the annihilation
of the Jews must be the necessary result. This
question is to be regarded without sentimentalism. We
are not here to have sympathy with the Jews, but
rather with our German people. If the German people
have sacrificed 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign,
so the authors of this bloody conflict will have to
pay for it with their lives".

Can the above diary entry really provide the
documentary evidence needed to sustain Gerlach's thesis
that Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jewish
people? Or, if any historian fails to accept it, are they
"Holocaust deniers?" In a later part of the article the
following opinion was offered:

"Independent of Hitler's fundamental
decision, the practitioners of the German racial
policy had discussed the murder of the Jews in all
occupied eastern European countries, asked for it, or
already begun it."

[i.e. by the 12th of December 1941]. Does this
nullify the argument of those who write that the origin
for genocide dated from the period Hitler wrote Mein
Kampf? And does it fail to prove any direct documentary
or other link between Hitler and those who purposefully
but "independently" instituted a murderous policy against
the Jews and others?

[1] December 12,
1941, by Gotz Aly ; translated by Gordon McFee
(from the German edition of the Berliner Zeitung,
December 13th, 1997). Source:
Holocaust-history.org.